Rockin' Comedy

February 3, 1999|By JOHN HARTL The Seattle Times

British director Brian Gibson has been so closely identified with rock movies (Breaking Glass, What's Love Got to Do With It) that at first he turned down the chance to make the aging-rockers comedy Still Crazy.

"The writers came to me in 1996 with the project, and at that point they'd been working on it for a year and a half or so," Gibson said. "I told them I'd done enough rock 'n' roll movies, and I said no."

Then he got an insulting letter from "Beano," one of the fictional rockers in the film. Gibson replied with a facetious letter from his lawyer, claiming that he'd been intimidated, followed by a note from his psychiatrist.

"This funny correspondence went on for a couple of weeks," said Gibson. "It was probably the most creative moment on the movie."

Gibson has known the writing team that created "Beano," Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, for a couple of decades. They previously worked together in the early 1990s, on a script that ended up at Disney, Cool Runnings, with another director and another writing team.

"You know how things are in L.A.," said Gibson, who once lived in California but has moved back to London. For every Hollywood film that gets made, he claims, 20 are developed and abandoned. "You live in hope that it will finally come to the screen."

Still Crazy, which opened Friday at the GCC Galleria in Fort Lauderdale, also took a circuitous route. After the writers had given up on Gibson and agreed to do the movie with another director, the deal fell through and they brought the script back to Gibson in mid-1997. This time he accepted, partly because he recognized the potential of one of the characters, a narcissistic lead singer named Ray, played by Bill Nighy.

"I started to see Ray as the character he became," said Gibson. "I saw the possibility of creating this sensual character. Then we met Bill Nighy, then I decided I was ready to make this movie. Without him, the movie would be sweet but it would have no real center."

He also decided on a quasi-documentary visual approach for the concert scenes involving a fictional 1970s group, Strange Fruit, which is attempting to resurrect itself in the 1990s.

"You choose a style that seems to work for the movie," he said. "Quasi-documentary is more aesthetically attractive than a documentary would be, but the lighting can still be quite gritty. The script is quite lovely, but it's in danger at times of being soft and sweet. The style is designed to balance that."

Early on, Gibson also decided to come up with an original score that would not be a pastiche of 1970s bands. One of the numbers, The Flame Still Burns, written by Mick Jones, Marti Frederiksen and Chris Difford, was nominated for a Golden Globe for best song.

Gibson had once worked with Mick Jones on rock videos. Clive Langer, who did the instrumental score, suggested putting Jones and Difford together; they collaborated on four of the songs. Nighy does his own singing on Scream Freedom, All Over the World, Black Moon and Dangerous Things.

"The result is some good music," said Gibson. "That Bill could do the vocals was quite amazing. We hadn't expected that."

Another rock veteran, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, came in for a week, just before shooting started, to talk with the actors about how to move onstage.

"Gary brought in a lot of anecdotal stuff about how people would handle themselves," said Gibson. "The script is the result of a lot of research.

"One of the delights of this film was sharing stories about the incredible narcissism of rock stars. You add the fact that they're all getting older and it starts to get funny."

Gibson, who has a medical degree and once directed dramas for the BBC, doesn't know exactly why he keeps directing movies with lots of music.

"It's no real deliberate policy," he said. "I don't really feel typecast because I enjoy it. I did Breaking Glass because it was my first chance to make a movie. I'd never done anything like it. I'm musical by instinct but not by training. I can't read music or play an instrument. It's the enthusiasm of the amateur without the dreariness of learning."